Regional literatures have a photographic memory, and regional authors represent dialect, landscape, micro-culture and spatiality with exacting precision. In this sense, regional works are inherently ekphrastic - local color emerges in texts through the re-presentation of music, art, images, sounds and locales. This intersection of image-into-text calls up a surprising breadth of experience in regional authors; authors like Faulkner, Cather, Welty and O’Connor had extensive experience ...